The Real Me
by ThomE.Gemcity-06
Summary: Episode Tag: Frenemies; with spoilers! After getting shot, Evan realizes what people really think of him. EvanWhumpage! A little language and a lot of emotional owies! Slightly depressing.


**a/n: Episode Tag: Frenemies. Spoilers! This is my 1st Royal Pains fic, so please review and tell me what you think. I also got another: "POE".**

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><p><strong>The Real Me<strong>

Evan flinched and jerked every time Divya fished a pellet from his butt, she'd given him something to numb the pain, but he could still feel the tweezers in his flesh. He was probably just imagining it, his mind over thinking things like it always seemed to do. But he was shot and that was reason enough for his worries.

He couldn't believe that this was happening to him. He'd finally found a girl that he really liked, was even starting to love and the relationship wasn't even real. Paige didn't even like him in that way back, she was paying him to be someone that he wasn't, to be the ex-boyfriend that she was too scared to tell the _General_ and her mother about. It wasn't fair, Evan deserved better than that. But he couldn't break their arrangement off; it was the only way that he ever got to see Paige.

He had to mention hunting.

Everything was fine, the dinner, the small talk, even that bourbon-thing. It had gone well, actually it had gone better than he thought that it would. And then it was over, the were walking out of the restaurant, waiting on the steps, Paige's parents waiting for the valet to bring around their SUV around. And then bam! there was that one beat of silence, silence that Evan couldn't take, even just for a second. He'd always been that way, needing to fill the silence with idle chit-chat so that he didn't feel awkward - but by talking he just made things awkward for himself and threw his beautiful play out the window.

So that beat of silence ruined him; all of his hard work, all of the studying that he put into this. He just had to mention hunting. He had thought that it would be safe, Paige said that it wasn't hunting season so what harm could the subject do? But no, apparently there was there was a VIP resort that had hunting year-around as long as you put back what you took, whatever that meant.

So then he had to commit himself to this hunting-thing, he got the gear, he had the look. But he didn't need the knowledge of the gun because he and Paige were going to pair-up, her making the kills and him taking the credit. It was a plan, a good one - well, it would have been a good one had the evening actually gone as they had planned it. But apparently Mr. Universe different plans for ol' Evan R. Lawson. Crappy plans because the General wanting to 'know' him on a _mano et mano_ basis was the worst thing that probably could have happened.

Probably.

There was talk of seventy-degrees and right flanks and Evan really had no idea what the hell was happening. He had even asked what the hell that meant and the General had said something along the lines of:

"No jokes here."

So Evan hadn't 'joked' anymore.

Nature had called, so he leaned his shotgun against the tree trunk as he answered said call. The General then yelled at him about that, that the gun could fall over and go off with the possibility of hitting someone. So Evan never did that again either.

There were two birds up ahead and Evan took the guess that they were partridges. The General told him to stay back and get down - well, actually he didn't say it, he made these hand gestures that did nothing for Evan and he was left not knowing what the hell to do. He shifted on his feet, big mistake on his part because he stepped on a twig and what do you know? It snapped. It had to have snapped, because this was him he was talking about, and everything bad always seemed to happen to him.

So the General hadn't been to happy because that stupid twig scared away the birds.

It had been a little bit of a blur after that and then the General had somehow shot him in the butt. The screech that had left his lips was embarrassing. He was face-down on the ground, the fire and pain in his rear causing him to clench his fists.

The General had looked at it.

"Just a flesh wound."

_Pfft._ Evan scoffed; this was no flesh wound - it was a friging gunshot wound!

He's text Hank, saying that it was a 9-1-2 emergency, that was more urgent than a 9-1-1 and Hank didn't even answer.

The pain had lessened ever so slightly as they waited for medical help to come rescue him, but he was still in pain.

The General had stood in front of him, not even having enough courtesy to crouch so that Evan didn't have to crane his neck and twist to look up at him.

"You're not cut out for this family, Evan." he said. "You're clumsy, and weak and you have no right to be a part be a part of this family. You will get a sum of money to stop seeing my daughter." he stated bluntly and harshly.

And it was harsh, because he wasn't weak and he may be clumsy but it wasn't as if he were a surgeon. No, he was just basically an accountant, the CFO for Hankmed. Working for his brother, not even able to get a job out of the family. So he guessed that in hind sight, he was a failure as well.

Finally, someone came for him, but it wasn't his brother, it wasn't his family. It was Divya, and that was even worse than him being shot in the butt by his fake-girlfriend's father.

Divya wasn't his friend; they were acquaintances in the work place. Her only putting up with him because he was Hank's 'little' brother. And now she... she was the one that was removing the shotgun pellets from his butt cheek and she wasn't doing it like a professional that he would have preferred.

"It's okay to say that you're in pain, Evan." Divya told him as she dropped yet another pellet into the tray. "It doesn't make you any less of a man."

Evan took a deep breath, his nostrils flaring with it. She sound sincere enough, and he was in pain... "It does hurt." he admitted softly.

And that was when Divya gave a bark of laugher, hitting him on the shoulder - hard. "Don't be such a baby, Evan!" she told him. "It's just a flesh wound."

There was that phrase again, 'it's just a flesh wound'. Yeah, well, he no longer had just a _flesh wound_, he was now wounded. Evan really just wanted to shoot Divya and the General with a shotgun in the ass, and hear them call it a flesh wound then. When it happened to them, wounding their pride and-and see what it felt like to be called a weak because you were in pain.

Evan clenched his hands into fists, his nail biting into the flesh of his palms. He forced himself to calm down; he didn't want to do something irrational... Something that he would enjoy immensely in that moment but would then make him look like the fool that he wasn't.

"What did you do to yourself, Evan?"

Evan turned his head to find that Hank had finally arrived, a hand over his mouth to hide the smirk that lay beneath.

"It's not funny." Evan told him. "Why are you laughing at me?"

"I'm not!" Hank said, his expression looking slightly pained, his lips twisted as he forced himself not to burst into laughter.

"He's not laughing are you, he's laughing with me..." Divya told him as she extracted another pellet. "At you." she grinned.

"It's not that funny." Evan told them.

"It's a little funny," Divya disagreed. "Tell Hank how it happened."

Hank looked at him expectantly.

Evan glared at the table as he spoke. "Nature called and I leaned my rifle against a tree, it fell over and shot me in the butt."

Now Hank did burst out in laughter.

Evan still didn't find it funny and when he said that he wouldn't do that again, he did mean it. Because that was not how he had been shot and he wasn't sure why he lied about it. Why was wrong with the truth? It was just that his fake-girlfriend's father shot him in the ass and then offered him money to stop seeing his daughter. Yeah, so maybe the truth was much more worse and even more embarrassing.

This way, with this lie - it was something that would actually happen in the real world, that it could have happened to anyone that wasn't trained to handle a gun. But the father of the girl who he wasn't actually going out with, but was pretending to be, shooting him in the ass and then offering him money to stop seeing his daughter... Which Evan knew wasn't because Paige loved him and her father hated him, but was because his daughter pretended to love Evan and he wasn't Collins-family material.

Right now, Evan didn't even think that he was at the moment he was R. Lawson-family material.

"That is classic Evan." Hank grinned as he left the room.

Evan squeezed his eyes shut, silent for the rest of the time that Divya took to take out the rest of the pellets, disinfect, stitch the deeper ones and bandage him. She then left him to his own devices, and he painfully bent down to pull his boxers back in place. He felt ashamed and quickly pulled his pants up along with them.

It hurt that Hank said that it was classic him, that this was classic Evan. That he shot himself in the ass on purpose or something. Like it was classic him when he got bullied in school and was shoved into trash cans and lockers. Hank might as well have said that he was a classic fool.

It was the next day and his butt still ached, he still felt embraced and ashamed about the whole being shot-thing, but he knew that a way to clear this whole thing up was to just tell his brother the truth. In the beginning he always thought that it was better to lie, but it was things like this, like finding out what the people around him really thought. That he was just an embarrassment, that he was a fool of the Lawson family, the clumsy, weak, younger brother. The exaggerator… the follower…

"So hypothetically, if I per say didn't exactly say what should have been said..." Evan started, his finger taping on the counter top as he looked at Hank.

"I would say, hypothetically to say what you mean, Evan." Hank answered slowly.

Evan looked at him for a long moment. Okay, so he'd come in here intending to tell Hank the truth, but once he got around to the time of the fact, he couldn't seem to get it out. He knew that if he said the truth, that it may change the opinion that Hank had on him, but he couldn't seem to do it. Because what if he did tell Hank what happened and that somehow made his brother change his opinion of him. It might be a good thing, but what if the opinion was something worse than what it already was?

"So, guess what I just found out this morning?" Evan said, quickly holding up a piece of paper.

Hank looked at him with raised brows.

"Dr. Peck just took out lasted patient."

"What?" Hank snatched the piece of paper from Evan hand.

"I know. What I don't get is how she found out. We have to keep our client list on low, Hank, or she gonna just keep snatching them away until she had everyone in the Hampton's."

"I'll take care of this." Hank said, his eyes still glued onto the paper as he left the kitchen.

Evan stared after him, a sad expression on his face. So disaster averted in Evan's eyes and now nothing will change. He was always going to be that weirdo in high school, the one that had no friends and would just as suddenly pop up in a group. The class clown, the fool. It always came to that, didn't it? Apparently that was him, Evan R. Lawson.

He wanted people to see the real him, but he was afraid. He wasn't a loser and he wasn't weak, he was smart and he knew things that others didn't, he'd survived this long.

It just sucked because the people that were supposed to be closest to him actually thought that he had shot himself in the ass while he was taking a piss. When in truth, that wasn't close to what really happened. And Evan knew that no one would know either.

And Evan felt like an idiot because it took him getting shot in the ass to see what people really thought. He thought that that only happened when you died or something. And he wasn't dead at the moment, so it was his Evan-curse, his bad luck. He was the only one in the family that seemed to have it; he was the best candidate for the crappies in the R. Lawson family-genes draw.

But he's dealt with that his whole life, so he was nearly positive that he could deal with this recent knowledge.


End file.
